WordPress Plugin Development for 2016 - Build 12 Plugins

Learn powerful WordPress development with plugins, APIs, hooks, the WP-Admin & more with free starter plugins to improve

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About This Course

Published 8/2015
English

Course Description

Have you ever wanted to know the secrets behind all the cool things that WordPress plugins and themes can do? This course is offered by an instructor who has developed over 250 WordPress plugins for major corporations and can now teach these skills to you.

For Those Developers Who Would Like To Know How To Develop Powerful WordPress Plugins!

After getting frustrated, because maybe a downloaded plugin does not fit your needs, why not take your WordPress programming skills to the next level and really learn how to develop your own plugins or customize other downloaded plugins to fit your needs?

For PHP Developers

Programming in WordPress is a snap when you already know PHP. This course shows how to take that PHP experience and parlay into professional WordPress development.

GET OVER 12 FREE PLUGINS INCLUDED WITH THIS COURSE AND LEARN HOW TO DEVELOP THEM ALL FROM SCRATCH!

Some Videos Come With FREE Complete Plugins

Besides just teaching the advanced concepts, some videos come with complete plugins that can be downloaded and used immediately after some customization as explained in each video.

In this course, I teach the powerful WordPress development concepts from:

Over 20 popular WordPress hooks available for use in your plugins and themes

Changing post and page content on the fly

Displaying messages on the administrative back end to writers, contributors and other users

User management

Writing your own dashboard and sidebar widgets

Hiding certain admin links and dashboard widgets from other users

Security hacks such as redirecting unauthorized users away from the wp-admin login form.

How to create a library of shortcodes in one plugin

WordPress' Quicktag API to add buttons to the WYSIWYG editor

When students finish this course, they will have a powerful WordPress programming skill that most developers do not have and trust me, this looks amazing to other programmers and on your resume.

What are the requirements?

Basic WordPress Skills

Basic HTML and CSS

Basic PHP a plus, but not required

What am I going to get from this course?

Develop powerful WordPress plugins: Both basic and advanced

Program using popular Wordpress APIs

Learn how to leverage over 20 powerful WordPress hooks through your theme and plugins and how to leverage them to manipulate Wordpress without editing the core

Restrict the Wordpress back end menu item from any group of users

Modify content from posts and pages on the fly

Add links and new menus to the Wordpress admin bar

Learn WordPress hooks and why they are so important for theme and plugin programming.

Hide certain dashboard widgets from any user

Add new fields to user profile pages and save them automatically when the user submits their information.

How to add, update and delete WordPress meta data without one line of MySQL

Create a social media plugin that allows the administrator to enter addresses for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and more. The plugin will both create a widget using the Widget API and a template tag that can be added to any theme.

Create new thumbnail sizes and access them from the WordPress media manager and your themes

Display messages to other administrators, writers, editors and contributors in the WordPress back

Secure your WordPress back end by redirecting unauthorized users back to the home page preventing even hackers can break in with brute force attacks

Creating your own WordPress dashboard widgets from scratch

Store persistent data in the WordPress database through transients using the Transients API

Insert posts and pages automatically behind the scenes.

User login detection

What is the target audience?

Anyone interested in becoming a more powerful Wordpress developer

Any Wordpress admin with a minimal knowledge of PHP

Programmers wanting to expand their plugin programming expertise

What you get with this course?

Not for you? No problem.30 day money back guarantee.

Forever yours.Lifetime access.

Learn on the go.Desktop, iOS and Android.

Get rewarded.Certificate of completion.

Curriculum

Section 1: Introduction and the Basics of WordPress Plugin Development

Check this list out often as I constantly show you how to work with WordPress hooks, which are the most important tool in any WP developer's arsenal for creating powerful and professional themes and plugins. Without hooks, WordPress could not be able to allow developers to extend it.

Scenario: What if you or your client's website needs to correct the spelling of your company name? Every time they type a company name, they forget to capitalize the name of the company. For branding purposes, it is important to capitalize the name of the company.

In this video tutorial, we show how to fix any capitalization issues with filter hook called the_filter. This hook allows us to modify any content.

For this example, we show how to fix the common error of spelling "WordPress" with a lowercase "p".

WordPress comes with this really awesome built-in function called bloginfo() that returns all kinds of information, but don't be fooled. This function returns more information that just your regular blog stuff!

What if a WordPress website has multiple writers and contributors. There may be guidelines or rules that each writer has to follow. It makes sense to add those guidelines to the top of any form where posts or pages can be added.

In this video, I show how to add that message with any HTML and CSS to the TOP of any form, so writers will see those messages.

Also, see the attached plugin file that you can modify with your own code in this video.

To start a new plugin file, download the attachment and put it in your wp-content/plugins directory. Rename this file as a .PHP file.

WordPress' Metadata API is extremely powerful, yet very easy to use and master. In this video, I show how to write one line of code to quickly and safely retrieve information from the three metadata tables in the WordPress MySQL database without writing one line of code.

WordPress' Metadata API also allows developers to change data without writing a single line of MySQL. In this video, I write single lines of code to quickly and safely update the meta data for both users and posts.

Widgets are perhaps the most complex way of presenting data in WordPress, but they can hold all types of data from HTML to PHP to CSS and Javascript. In this video, I create a simple widget to create a form where the WordPress admin can enter a URL for website visitors to visit and then add a blurb underneath the form.

Sample code is attached in the resources section so you can download it and try the following exercises.

Lecture 30

Exercise: Add 3 more fields to the Visit Website API and Display Its HTML

Shortcodes are WordPress' way to provide writers and administrators a way to call WordPress functions without doing the PHP code themselves. They can return simple data or be controlled with attributes that resemble HTML attributes.

In this video, we create a simple shortcode using the Shortcode API to return the date and time to the website visitor without the admin requiring one line of HTML to dynamically call the date and time. All that is needed is a simple PHP echo statement and I show you how to code that in this video.

This plugin comes specifically bare. It only shows the date and time, but in this exercise, students must add support for up to 5 attributes. Read the text in this lecture to see what attributes you should add.

Sometimes you have a specific CSS class that you want to include somewhere in the body without the worries of hard-coding them in a theme. If you distribute a plugin with its own CSS classes, you can tell WordPress to add them to the <BODY> tag. I explain how to do that in this video.

Maybe you want to create a theme or plugin that has value for the user. Facebook share buttons are always great for this purpose. I explain how to do it in this video for your theme, but the next video will take the "theme" concept and show you how to do the same thing in your plugins.

Some WordPress themes do not always display a post or page's featured image, creating frustration for the administrator. This plugin will always display the featured image regardless of what the theme is doing. It saves time and headaches for the administrator.

The Hello Dolly plugin is probably the most deleted plugin on most WordPress websites, but it serves as a great beginning to plugin development, so in this video, I take you through the code. In the NEXT video, we will spin our own version of Hello Dolly that is personally suited to us.

Section 6: Creating and Processing Thumbnails for Post Featured Images

We can programmatically create thumbnail sizes instead of using the defaults that come with WordPress such as 'thumbnail', 'large', etc. In this video, I show you how to add image sizes including their width, height and cropping options and then how to apply them to a WP_QUERY loop.

There may be a situation when you need to retrieve just the thumbnail URL of a featured image. One use could be to send people a logo or to link to one from any post of page, other than the featured image from a current ppost that displays through WP_QUERY.

In this video, I show you several ways to get that information from obtaining the post ID to getting the ID of the thumbnail (called the attachment in the WordPress world). The URL will be retrieved with these variables.

Just because an authorized user does not know the administrator login information does not mean that they can still hack the form. Hackers can use brute force techniques to enter with improper security settings.

In this video, we look at code to protect our backend in a private administrator environment where we can redirect unauthorized users and hackers to our home page.

This video also includes a plugin that you can customize in the Resources section.

In this video, I demonstrate how to add code to any plugin or your theme's functions.php file to replace content entered into any post or page using the WordPress filter hook called "the_content" and PHP's ereg_replace to replace dynamic code with regular expressions. We use an example of generating a secure Paypal form with Paypal's hosted button ID.

This is a complete video on creating a social media plugin that allows the administrator to enter addresses for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and more. The plugin will both create a widget using the Widget API and a template tag that can be added to any theme.

You can create a library of as many shortcodes as you'd like and put them all into one handy plugin. Here, we create a basic library of 2 basic shortcodes and you are free to add as many more as you'd like.

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Instructor Biography

Bruce Chamoff,
Web Developer of 20 Years and Songwriter of Over 40 Years

CEO of the Web Designer Mall, a one-stop shop for all web designers and web developers.

I have designed and developed over 1,000 websites in the past 20 years for companies of all sizes from small businesses to major Fortune 500 corporations. Being the owner of a prestigious online mall for web developers, I have programmed everything from WordPress to Drupal to Joomla to simple HTML5.

Involved in the WordPress Community. I am also a speaker at WordCamps in the United States.

The Music, The Songwriting

I love writing, recording, and producing music, mainly my own originals. I play sax and piano and have over 150 songs. Yes, I should have gone for that record deal, but I still enjoy the process of making music!